The above statements frame the arguments of the countless citizens who oppose marijuana legalization. Their anger over the potential decriminalization of cannabis is at times palpable. Impassioned pleas against legalization emanate from all corners of our society. Religious leaders, academic researchers, physicians, and nonprofit organizations have all gone on the record condemning the growing movement to legalize pot. Many believe that if we allow recreational marijuana use, we’ll slip as a society down the slope into rampant addiction, unemployment, sloth, violence, disease, and moral decay.

Previously employed professionals will start smoking pot and be laid off en masse. Promising college students will be handed a joint at a party, become addicted, and piss away their future. Teenagers in their naivete will follow the lead of these miscreants and soon a new generation will descend into hopeless addiction. Reformed users will be pulled back in by the easy availability of marijuana and will again flood our hospital emergency rooms, unemployment offices, and prisons. The “gateway drug” will lead us down the path to unbridled abuse of opiates, inhalants, and psychedelics.

But what if these assumptions are just wildly speculative fantasy? What if we’re stronger as a society than we all think? Its discrediting to our ambition, resilience, and virtue, not to mention our basic biology, to blindly assume that marijuana legalization would ruin us all. Plenty worse things than legalized marijuana have been thrust on us as a people and it can be argued that we’ve overcome, or at least adapted to, a great many of them.

Other situations have caused considerable harm or have proven elusive to reconcile. Prohibition repeal, the AIDS pandemic, virus outbreaks, foreign wars, natural disasters, terrorism foreign and domestic, racial integration and strained race relations, financial collapse and the devaluation of the dollar, a pitiful job market, and overwhelming destruction of our health and our healthcare, among many other things, have all tested our resolve as a citizenry. But nothing thus far has ruined us. Life has proceeded on and we have managed accordingly. The sun still rises.

We are nothing if not malleable.

Besides, this might be an example of the slippery slope fallacy. An aberration of critical thinking, a slippery slope occurs in an argument when we presume that, by taking one action, another action, this one markedly more harmful or insidious than the first, will automatically result. This process can theoretically be repeated until the results are cataclysmic. It can be considered a desperate attempt to win an argument when this tactic is deployed. The frailty of our viewpoints and the cloudiness of our perspectives are often illuminated when we recruit the slippery slope into our arguments.

Legalizing marijuana won’t ruin us as a society. Addicts won’t be convulsing in the streets. We won’t be violently mugged by stoners lurking around every corner. Our friends and our children won’t descend into an abyss of chemical abuse and wanton criminality. Our emergency rooms won’t be filled with psychoticpotheads restrained on gurneys. And there won’t be scores of users riddled with pneumonia, hepatitis, and failing organs in our critical care units. The typical adult who uses marijuana recreationally won’t allow a few puffs on the weekends to lead to a debilitating heroin addiction or unhinged solvent abuse.

Perhaps I’m guilty of a logical fallacy myself: arguing against a straw man. Assuredly no one who’s reasonable can be this over-the-top and hyperbolic about weed. But we might be mistaken about that. Remember that the majority of voters in elections are older adults and seniors. Theirs is the demographic most likely to reliably turn out at the polls. A large proportion of these seniors identify as Christians and conservative Republicans. Drug use offends their sensibilities and runs counter to their religious beliefs; people shouldn’t smoke pot because its dangerous, gross, indecent, and just plain wrong. And some are adamantly, vehemently opposed to not only drugs but alcohol, too. Have you ever met an octogenarian who despises drinking and the people who partake in it? This mindset is pervasive among seniors; its what many belonging to their generation continue to believe.

And these are the people who are deciding elections.

And maybe you agree with them. Or maybe your family does, along with your friends and coworkers.

Think about your next door neighbor for a minute. He’s probably a nice guy. Polite, social, waves hello to you. Say he’s got a family. His wife is also neighborly. Kids seem bright and well-behaved from what you’ve seen of them. He has a job; an accountant, maybe, or insurance salesman or mechanical engineer or college administrator. It doesn’t matter: he’s gainfully employed and providing for his family.

He and his family are good neighbors. They’re quiet and unobtrusive. He keeps his yard and property maintained. They don’t have droves of guests over at all hours. From what you can assume, he pays his taxes and his bills. He has a good reputation as a responsible and caring family man in the community.

Now let’s say he smokes marijuana.

Does this instantly change your opinion of the guy? Is he now a detestable pothead? Do you pity him? Does he disgust you?

If your answers are yes, answer this: how does his smoking weed affect you? As described above, there’s nothing he’s doing that is impacting your life as a direct result of his recreational marijuana use. For all you know, he’s a responsible upstanding citizen aside from this perceived affliction, this character flaw. He is not harming you or infringing upon you by quietly smoking marijuana in the privacy of the home he owns. He’s just trying to relax.

Who cares if your neighbor smokes pot?

Now let’s say that you have the same good reputation as your neighbor. But on the weekends you like to smoke a cigar and have a few cocktails. You do this to relax. What’s the difference? Should he view you as a crass, disheveled, reckless drunk? Of course not. The evidence, the public opinion of you, suggests the opposite: you’re an intelligent, responsible, and kind person.

The substance you choose to help you unwind should be irrelevant to any discussion of your merit as a person. The means by which you contribute to society, the ways that you demonstrate kindness to others, the actions you take to improve your life and the lives of those around you should be the criteria by which you’re judged.

The coworker who helped you get a promotion might be a cocaine user. The lady down the street who found your missing dog might down a fifth of vodka every night. Your favorite childhood teacher might have been a two-pack-a-day smoker. The best friend who stood by you during the most difficult time in your life could be hiding an addiction to painkillers.

Plenty of lifelong sober people can be unproductive, unstable assholes.

The point is that, so long as someone’s marijuana use doesn’t affect others, we have little ground to shun that person and venomously protest their right to do it. We all have our vices, our bad habits, and our comforts, many of which we would prefer to keep hidden from others.

If you have a valid argument against marijuana decriminalization, perhaps potential financial repercussions of legalizing it, that’s one thing, but it’s exceedingly arrogant, contemptuous, and illogical to support keeping a defensibly innocuous substance out of the hands of consenting adults just because of your personal beliefs. Especially when the adults using that substance are doing so without harming or disturbing anyone else.

This description may include people who you know, people you respect, maybe even loved ones.